At first we are occupied in work with an abundance of individual tasks that have no inner relation to one another. But the more work advances from an external contact with objects to an inner change of them, the more necessary is it that these tasks should be unified so as to form a whole; and that each task should have its position in this whole, and represent in itself a particular aspect of the whole. The proof of greatness in a "work" is just that the nature of the individual aspects is determined fundamentally by their relation within the whole; that what is characteristic in the work as a whole is manifested even in its simplest elements; thus, for example, every independent thinker has particular views with regard to the nature of the fundamental forms of logical thought such as the concept and the judgment; in the same way every independent artist creates his own language of forms. Work not only leads to a unity of life in the case of individuals; but, further, without a union of individual forces for a common end, without an organisation of all human work, we should stand defenceless in face of the infinity of the world, and we could never advance to a state of culture. In such community of work man creates a new sphere of existence for himself; he forms his world of work and sets it in contrast to everything which does not come within it. This world of work transcends the individual; and yet it is our world; it is sustained by human power and, directing and forming, reacts upon man. For, the more unity this world of work acquires and the more control it wins over the object, the more definite departments and relations it evolves in itself, the more does it manifest characteristic laws and methods which, with superior power, prescribe to human activity its nature and direction, but which can originate nowhere else than in the domain of man. And so within the domain of man we rise above all caprice and subjectivity: since the law of the object determines man's work, his life is raised above the antithesis between soul and object. Work is not something that man, essentially perfect, undertakes incidentally and as something supplementary, but it is that through which he first develops a spiritual life; through which he acquires a spiritual existence; and the character of the work determines at the same time the nature of this existence. As the individual departments of work evolve characteristic modes of thought and conviction, so out of work as a whole a particular spiritual nature arises which does not exist in relation to a world external to it, but contains within itself a world formed by its own activity. All this, in conformity with our fundamental conviction, involves the implication that man is not a spiritual being from the beginning, but only has the potency to become one.